Learning Business Skills Through Junior Achievement

Volunteers with J.A. help students around the world understand real-life economics. Transcript of radio broadcast:

This is
the VOA Special English Economics Report.

Junior
Achievement is an international movement to educate young people about business
and economics. The purpose is to help them prepare to succeed in a world
economy.

The
organization is the largest of its kind. JA Worldwide says it reaches over
eight million students each year in more than one hundred countries. Programs
begin in elementary school and continue through middle and high school. The
education is based on the ideas of market-based economics and entrepreneurship.

Junior
Achievement began in nineteen nineteen in Springfield, Massachusetts. Two
business leaders, Horace Moses and Theodore Vail, joined with Senator Murray
Crane of Massachusetts to start it.

For more
than fifty years, Junior Achievement programs met after school. They began as a
group of business clubs. The organization started with a small number of
children ages ten to twelve.

But in
nineteen seventy-five, Junior Achievement began to offer classes during school
hours. Many more young people joined the organization once it began to teach
business skills as part of the school day.

Volunteers
from the community teach about businesses, how they are organized, and how
products are made and sold. They also teach about the American and world
economies and about industry and trade.

The
Junior Achievement Company Program teaches young people how entrepreneurship
works. They learn about business by operating their own companies.

The
students develop a product and sell shares in their company. They use the money
to buy the materials they need to make their product, which then they sell.
Finally, they return the profits to the people who bought shares in the
company.

Junior
Achievement says two hundred eighty-seven thousand volunteers support its
programs around the world. In the United States alone, there are more than
twenty-two thousand places that hold Junior Achievement events.

Junior
Achievement Incorporated and Junior Achievement International combined their
operations in two thousand four. They formed Junior Achievement Worldwide. Its
headquarters are in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

And
that's the VOA Special English Economics Report, written by Shelley Gollust and
Mario Ritter. Transcripts and archives of our reports are at
voaspecialenglish.com along with a link to the Junior Achievement Web site,
ja.org. I'm Faith Lapidus.